May 2, 2013 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing has quietly released an update for the Bing iPad App, adding new features and making optimization improvements to the app. The app can be downloaded for free over here in the app store. The changes, as listed in version 1.3 include: Bookmark Web/Image/News Search Query Provide Daily Trending Images with density layout Enable Map Local Business Category Search Add Popular Now in search suggestion Performance Optimization in iPad1 Enable Related Search in detail web page Enable Browsing Page Close Button Dictionary, Mind Reader, Voice Search (CN mkt only) I've te [...]

Bing Updates Windows 8 Apps Enhancing News, Finance, Weather, Sports, Maps & Travel

Apr 16, 2013 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft announced they have made major updates to the Bing Apps for Windows 8 across most of their apps including News, Finance, Weather, Sports, Maps and Travel. The video below walks you through the changes, but here are some highlights of the core changes to each section. News: You can now customize the type of news you want to see by category. For example, if you like sports but not entertainment news, you can tell Bing, and the app will show you only sports related news items. In addition to that, Bing has added RSS feeds and offline reading. Maps: The maps feature has improved [...]

Microsoft Shows Off Coming Improvements To Bing App’s Voice Search

Mar 22, 2013 at 2:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Microsoft has shared video of what was a confidential, employee-only demonstration of new voice search capabilities in its Bing app for Windows Phones. The demo, reported by MSFTKitchen, shows a substantially faster and more accurate voice search experience that also performs better in noisy situations. In the demo, Bing's new voice search system appears to respond about twice as fast as the existing system. The speed improvement gives Bing the ability to show search results while the user is still saying the search query. The Microsoft employee giving the demo says that the new s [...]

Mobile Search Beyond Google: In App Search Tools

Dec 3, 2012 at 2:49pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

A couple months back, I covered the rise of a new generation of Windows Phones, and how they will slowly bring more mobile search market share to Bing. But, there's more to mobile search than just Google and Bing. The app stores for iOS, Android and Windows offer countless of downloadable apps that offer built-in search engines. Some of these apps are from major players in their respective verticals and may have a more direct impact on your business than the general search engines. Let's look at a few business types and the apps that provide good search opportunities. [caption id="att [...]

Last Minute Tips To Use Mobile Search To Ramp-Up Holiday Sales & Beyond

Nov 5, 2012 at 12:53pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total. Your Holiday To Do List So, if you have a mobile store up and running, you'll want to make sure your mobile store is ready to attract, inform, and convert incoming shoppers. Here are some great tips from past columns that should be part of your to-do list: If you have a responsive design mobile site, you'll want to take a second look at the Tune [...]

Video: Searching Bing On Windows 8

Oct 26, 2012 at 12:13pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft released a video showing how you can use Bing on a Windows 8 powered device. They call the video, "Search Reimagined" and show off the touch aspects to search, as opposed to how search works currently on Bing.com. Here is the video: Bing on Windows 8: Search Reimagined from Bing on Vimeo. You can see how the experience feels a lot more fluid, interactive and fun to use versus the current search experience on Bing.com. Windows 8 is Microsoft's latest operating system release designed to work on their desktops, laptops, tablets, and home theater PCs. It is their most r [...]

Everybody With A Maps App Is Piling On Apple

Sep 26, 2012 at 3:43pm ET by Matt McGee

It's a marketing tactic that's about as old as time itself: When a competitor stumbles, you turn it into opportunity for self-promotion. That's certainly been the case since the Apple Maps app stumbled out of the gate a week ago on iOS 6. Bing is the latest competitor to call for attention. The company published a new blog post today touting its Bing App for iOS -- not because it has any new features, but because "you may be holding a brand new smartphone and wondering which apps have the essential search and mapping functionality you need." Bing wants everyone to know that its existi [...]

iPhone 5 Won’t Change Mobile Search, But Can Nokia?

Sep 24, 2012 at 1:30pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

With the launch of the iPhone 5, perhaps the most eagerly awaited electronics launch ever, speculation has been rampant on the impact it'll have on the mobile phone market, on Apple's future as an innovator post-Steve Jobs, and on the coolness of the next gadget to get dropped into your pocket. But from a mobile search perspective, iPhone 5 is pretty much more of the same. A more effective version of Siri will be standard in the new phone's iOS 6 - but that was a game changer from the iPhone 4s. iPhone 5 has certainly caused a sales storm, pushing more smartphones into more pockets. B [...]

Confirmed: Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablets To Use Bing As Default Search Engine

Sep 7, 2012 at 4:30pm ET by Greg Sterling

Ubergizmo is reporting that Bing (not Google) will be the default search engine for the Amazon browser on the new Kindle tablets. (We were able to confirm this with Microsoft directly earlier this evening.) The original Kindle Fire used Google. Amazon is likely to sell several million of these new devices given their aggressive pricing (partly subsidized by ads). If so, that could provide a boost to Bing, especially in a mobile/quasi-mobile context. There are several alternative browsers currently available for Kindle Fire/HD including Opera, Maxthon and Dolphin. I would anticipate tha [...]

Bing Completes “Global Ortho” High Resolution Imagery Project For Continental US

Aug 30, 2012 at 12:32pm ET by Greg Sterling

Back when Bing Maps was called Microsoft Virtual Earth (2006) the company bought Vexcel, a US Defense Department contractor that specialized in high resolution aerial photography and automated 3D image rendering. That acquisition became the basis of Bing Maps' subsequent ambitious aerial imagery and 3D mapping efforts. Microsoft then improved upon the camera that Vexcel had developed. In 2010 Microsoft embarked on what it calls its Global Ortho (GO) project. For the past two years Bing has been "collecting every square inch of the Continental United States and Western Europe at 30cm resolut [...]

Bing Previews Rich Search Experience For Windows 8

Aug 16, 2012 at 11:01am ET by Greg Sterling

Windows 8 is almost ready to hit the market. When it does it appears that it will deliver a new more "immersive" search experience, via Bing. In the video at the bottom of this page, Microsoft's Stefan Weitz demonstrates that new experience on a Microsoft Windows 8 tablet (presumably a Surface device). Windows 8 Bing appears to be very fast and it's highly visual, one of the most appealing aspects of the Bing experience. From my vicarious perusal of the materials the most compelling new feature appears to be what Microsoft/Bing is calling "snap." Initially, search results appear in a gri [...]

Microsoft Hires Hillary Clinton’s Former Campaign Chief Mark Penn For Bing Strategy Role

Jul 23, 2012 at 9:43am ET by Greg Sterling

[caption id="attachment_128353" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Credit: MarkPenn.com"][/caption] By all accounts Microsoft is struggling. It's true that Bing is growing, but only slightly, while partner Yahoo continues to lose search share (to Bing) keeping the "Search Alliance" in the doldrums. Microsoft also recently took $6+ billion write-down on its 2007 aQuantive acquisition, resulting in a loss for its most recent fiscal quarter. Its core Office and Windows franchises are still healthy but their future is cloudy as PC sales continue to slow. Microsoft's Windows Phones and m [...]

Switchboard Tags: Like Canonical Tags, But For Mobile SEO

Jul 16, 2012 at 3:15pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

When Google published their new guidelines for mobile SEO, the item that made headlines was their declaration of responsive design as the preferred option. Last month, I covered the basics on how responsive design works and how to optimize it. But the second option Google discussed got lost in the headlines: increased support for purpose-built mobile sites located on m-dot subdomains (e.g. m.brand.com. ) This type of site had previously been flagged by Google’s Matt Cutts as being the favorite from a usability standpoint. While Google now favors responsive sites, their support for m-do [...]

Confirmed: Bing 411 Closing June 1st

May 10, 2012 at 9:34am ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft is closing down their toll-free voice search program named Bing 411. I have confirmed the Bing 411 service is closing by calling the service and hearing immediately the message: Bing 411: On June 1st, we are discontinuing the Bing 411 service. There were reports of this via LiveSide where they said they "received a tip" on this news. But this is indeed happening and Bing is closing down their 411 service. Google shut down their GOOG-411 service back in 2010. Bing kept theirs live hoping to fill that void, but clearly with the rise of smartphones and voice search embedde [...]

Analyst: Mobile To Overtake PC For Local Search By 2015

Apr 20, 2012 at 5:45pm ET by Greg Sterling

Analyst firm BIA/Kelsey has projected that by 2015 there will be more local searches coming from smartphones than PCs in the US. It's a bold prediction and one that has logical merit: smartphone search volumes are growing faster than search on the PC. While local search is at least 20 percent of total queries on the PC (per Google) it's at least 40 percent of smartphone queries, also according to Google. Mobile vs. PC Local Search Volumes (BIA/Kelsey Forecast) Source: BIA/Kelsey (2012) In some categories such as restaurants and travel, mobile searches represent 15 - 20 percent [...]

Microsoft And Nokia Unify Maps On PC, Mobile

Feb 28, 2012 at 5:21pm ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft and Nokia announced the fruit of their recent mapping collaboration today. Each company has a blog post describing what's changed and improved (Bing, Nokia). The effort comes out of the companies' strategic partnership in mobile. As part of that arrangement Microsoft is relying heavily on the Nokia-Navteq mapping and data infrastructure. Nokia for its part has made Ovi Maps much more Bing-like in appearance. Essentially the UI has been simplified, colors have been muted and there's an improved "visual hierarchy" at each level of zoom. It's challenging for me to specifically tell w [...]

Nokia Now “Powering” Bing Maps

Jan 19, 2012 at 2:50pm ET by Greg Sterling

In May of last year I had a conversation with someone who told me that Nokia Maps (Navteq) would effectively replace the infrastructure behind Bing Maps. I was surprised to say the least and wrote about it in a story entitled Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia? The impression I got is that Bing would control the presentation layer and search on top of maps but that the "guts" would come from Nokia/Navteq. At the time of the story Microsoft offered the following comment: Bing Maps has utilized Nokia content for road data, geo-coding and routing services for several years, through N [...]

Google Maps The Great Indoors (Android Only)

Nov 29, 2011 at 12:51pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google is bringing the blue dot indoors. Google Maps for Android 6.0 is going to start showing interior maps of airports, select malls and retail stores in the US and Japan. In Japan transit stations are also mapped. The floor plan data has been obtained from all the participating entities, which Google's Steve Lee says are "very excited" to be a part of the program. Those entities include numerous Macy's, Bloomingdales, Home Depots and all US IKEA stores. (See the full US list at the bottom.) Below is a Google-provided screenshot of the Mall of America before interior maps and after: [...]

Bing Marries Native App, HTML5 In Upgraded Mobile Version

Nov 2, 2011 at 1:16pm ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft has updated its iPhone and Android apps to make them more consistent with the features and user experience in the HTML5 version of Bing. The HTML5 mobile web version of Bing had actually "gotten ahead" of the native apps that Microsoft had developed. The upgraded Bing app is an interesting hybrid approach as Microsoft seeks to leverage the capabilities of the handset but also make the app work across platforms in a consistent way: Rather than tightly binding functions into a mobile client, we want to embrace the drive towards exposing our functions via an HTML5 experience. In o [...]

Bing On Mobile Search & SEO

Oct 17, 2011 at 9:17am ET by Bryson Meunier

If you read this column on a regular basis, you may think that Google is the only game in mobile search. The fact is, SEOs optimize for traffic, and Google is the mobile search market leader, so it is often the focus of our mobile optimization efforts. But it’s not the only game in town. As someone who uses mobile search often, I am more often than not frustrated at the number of sites in the results that make me do extra work pinching and zooming to get the information I need. I’m hoping a mobile search engine can come along that will provide a better user experience than Google. An [...]

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